Descendant

at the size of the army that had gone down in defeat to provide those building materials. But what she hadn’t stopped to consider was that the inside of the roof would be similarly tiled. The entire place was a monument to the Fallen Viking on a massive scale.

Mason imagined that vaulting space stuffed to capacity with a full company of raucous Einherjar, lit with roaring fires in the dozens of massive fire pits down the center, aglow with torchlight from the hundreds of sconces lining the walls. She thought of all the details she remembered from the stories she’d learned when she was a kid. Of the host of Valkyrie maids in winged helmets, bearing jugs of mead and platters of roast venison and boar . . . of Odin sitting on his throne beside his beautiful wife, presiding over the whole crazy party . . .

This? Wasn’t like that.

A thick layer of dust shrouded everything in gray, and cobwebs hung like curtains in the spaces between the rafters. The fire pits were long dead, as were the torches in the sconces on the walls, and the rows of tables were piled with the remains of roast carcasses and loaves of bread that had long since petrified. The place looked like it had been deserted for centuries—as if the mindless hordes of Einherjar outside had simply forgotten to refresh themselves after the battle. Or maybe it was because the fighting had never ended. Days full of fighting, nights full of feasts . . . and yet, Mason recalled how she hadn’t been able to tell where the sun was in the sky when she’d been outside, and she really no idea how long a day lasted Asgard. But looking around, she certainly understood something of the so-called “twilight of the gods.” In the intervening years since the Aesir had been a dominant force in human belief systems, things had pretty obviously gone downhill. The hall stank of death—and not the good, fresh, violent kind that the Vikings reveled in, but rather the slow decline into decrepitude and irrelevance.

It doesn’t matter, Mason thought. All that mattered to her was getting the spear and getting home.

She took a lurching step forward. But as she crossed the threshold, the massive doors swung shut behind her with a muted boom like distant thunder. She gasped, and suddenly, the sound echoed and distorted in her mind, warping into a refrain composed of a myriad of sounds. A car trunk slamming . . . The bolt lock on a shed door sliding home . . . The rattle of the Gosforth gym doors that wouldn’t open . . . The creaking hinges of the storage cellar trapdoor closing. A twisted soundtrack to accompany her claustrophobia.

She couldn’t breathe.

Couldn’t move.

Trapped . . .

It felt as though something was shriveling, deep inside her. Shrinking back into the darkness. Her breath felt hot in her lungs, and her windpipe felt like it was closing.

I can’t do this. . . .

Her hands reached up, clawing at her throat, and her fingers brushed the iron medallion she wore. Fennrys’s medallion.

Yes. She heard his voice in her head. Calm and steady and cool as water on a burn. You can.

X

The measure of a man’s worth is in the weight of his heart.

That was, according to Rafe, how the hieroglyphics on the lintel stone over the entrance to the Hall of Judgment translated. Fennrys had been hoping that the whole heart-weighing thing was a metaphor. Would that have been too much to ask for at this stage?

As he stepped into the torch-lit, vaulted stone chamber, his attention was entirely occupied by an elegant set of slender scales, standing on a raised stone platform in the middle of the space. Two small, shallow dishes—each just big enough to hold a human heart—hung suspended by slender golden chains. Fennrys felt his own heart thud painfully in his chest. His familiarity with Egyptian mythology was hazy, but even he had seen enough references to the Trial of the Soul to know what came next. If he wanted to pass through the Hall of Judgment and out the other side into the place that Rafe had told him was called Aaru—where the Egyptian underworld borders brushed against those of the Norse Helheim—then he would have to have his heart weighed.

The only catch, of course, was that Fennrys was—as Rafe had earlier told Sobek—only sort of dead. That might put a crimp in the proceedings, Fenn thought as he wondered just exactly how they would get the heart out of his chest, and how badly it would hurt. But it wasn’t the idea of pain that terrified him. It was the judgment itself.

It was the fact that he knew, deep in his bones, that he was not a pure soul. There were petty crimes and misdemeanors, certainly. But more than that, there were the things he’d done that had forever tainted him. Marked him as a bad person. Fennrys had killed. In his capacity as a guardian of the Samhain Gate, the portal between the mortal realm and the kingdoms of Faerie that stood hidden in New York’s Central Park, he had killed a lot. A lot of Fae that is, and in the service of protecting the mortal realm, certainly, but still. He’d done it, and with a kind of savage, red joy. He was good at it. In fact, he’d always been proud of his skills as a warrior. Always begrudged the Fae for having taken him away from a destiny that would have seen him kill men.

Fennrys was, in his heart of hearts, a killer. And a betrayer.

Rafe caught his eye in that moment and must have guessed what Fennrys was thinking. “Hey,” he said quietly. “I’ve seen souls pass through this hall that I never thought would make it. Thieves, liars . . . murderers, even. The judgment isn’t cut-and-dried. It’s complicated. Just . . . I’m not going to say ‘relax’—because that would be stupid—but . . . stay cool.”

“Sure,” Fenn said. “I’m a Viking. I’m damn near an icicle.”

Rafe shook his head and slapped Fennrys gently on the shoulder, pushing him forward a step into the hall. But in spite of Rafe’s reassurances, Fennrys felt himself nearing a panic state. Okay, maybe you didn’t have to be spotless to make it through. But if the consistent reactions of every semidivine being he encountered these days were anything to go by, Fennrys was more than flawed. Much more. Much worse.

He didn’t even know what that could be. But it suddenly occurred to him that maybe it would be for the best if he didn’t make it all the way through the hall. Maybe it should all just end here.

Then he saw her.

Ammit. The Soul Eater.

Hunched and coiled, ready to spring, the creature crouched in a deep pit dug into the earth beneath the dais where the scales stood. Her eye sockets were empty in a seamed and hideously reptilian face that bore a passing resemblance to Sobek when he’d been in his crocodile guise. But there the similarities ended. The Soul Eater was nothing that could be found in the mortal realm. She was a primeval being. A chimera. Neither one thing nor another, but a meshing of forms. A lion’s mane, thick and tangled and soaked in old, dried blood, swept back from her forehead and thickly furred the powerful leonine shoulders and torso that flowed down into front legs that more resembled arms, ending in paws that were almost hand-like, with scythe-like talons. The creature’s hindquarters were the powerful, muscle-heavy haunches of a Nile hippopotamus, with a thick-folded bluish-purple hide, coated with greenish slime.

Fennrys felt his heartbeat lurch and then slow as he approached the scales. The hall, empty and thick with shadow, echoed with his footsteps, and the air burned in his lungs as he sucked in deep breaths, trying to still the urge to flee while the screaming voice in his head told him that if he did this thing—if he let himself be judged—he would die. Not just die, but be destroyed. Utterly.

As a Viking, all he’d ever wanted was to die honorably. To seek the reward of his ancestors, live his unlife in Asgard, feasting and fighting eternally in the afterworld. The reality of it had been something else—a dungeon cell, chains, suffering, torture for crimes he didn’t even understand having committed. But then he’d been given a second chance, and returned from beyond the walls of death. What in hell did he think he was doing then, willfully walking back across that line? Why? For what?

For Mason.